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posted by mrpg on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoke-gets-in-your-lungs dept.

GeekWire:

After enduring days of record-setting, eye-watering levels of smoke in the air, the Seattle area is in for relief, thanks to a shift in wind patterns. But the debate over whether this is the "new normal," the old normal or the abnormal is likely to play out for months and years to come.

The National Weather Service is predicting a rise in onshore air flow, sweeping plumes of wildfire smoke toward the east (sorry about that, Wenatchee) and moderating temperatures. Thursday's high temperatures in the Seattle-Olympia area are expected to be 12 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today's .

[...] In his latest blog post , University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass explains the mechanism behind this week's smoky skies: An express train of lower-atmosphere winds delivered smoke from fires in the North Cascades and southern British Columbia directly into Puget Sound.

[...] Is this a taste of the new normal in an era of global warming? Not necessarily. Mass has argued persuasively that the wildfire trend actually marks a return to the "old normal" after nearly a century of aggressive fire suppression and forest mismanagement.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:16PM (#725277)

    So by your own line of reason, increases in wildfire frequency isn't evidence that changes in how wildfires are treated have lead to increases in wildfire frequency because there is another theory that also predicts it.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:51AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @04:51AM (#725624) Journal

    So by your own line of reason, increases in wildfire frequency isn't evidence that changes in how wildfires are treated have lead to increases in wildfire frequency because there is another theory that also predicts it.

    One has to look at the data in more detail. There was a huge increase [nih.gov] in acreage burned by wildfires after around 1983 and these fires were allowed to burn longer. From the linked report, tables 1 and 2 show substantial increase in the frequency and size of wildfires starting in the early 1980s with a huge jump at the time and moderate increases since. The huge jump coincides with the change in policy.

    And later on, the report had this to say

    Fire seasons in 2003–2012 averaged more than 84 days longer than in 1973–1982, reflecting a positive trend of just over three days per year since the 1970s (figure 3, table 3). While first discovery dates were over two weeks later on average in 2003–2012 compared with 1993–2002, later control dates more than compensated. This reflects the fact that over the last four decades, the average large wildfire burn time grew from nearly six days in 1973–1982, to nearly 20 days in 1983–1992, nearly 37 days in 1993–2002 and over 50 days in 2003–2012 (table 3).

    In other words, instead of ruthlessly suppressing large fires within a week of the fire starting as were done in the 1970s (and part of a policy dating back to roughly the 1920s in the US), they often allowed the fire to burn for just over seven weeks on average. That's roughly an order of magnitude longer!

    Notice how we went from the one basic parameter of wildfire frequency to more useful ones (for distinguishing hypotheses at hand), particularly that of the duration of wildfire burns. It is typical of the climate hysteria approach to seize on some minor bit of data as evidence of the harm of climate change, which upon deeper study turns out to be a bunch of uninformed bullshit.